President of Royal Society Called a Liar by former Chancellor of Exchequer

Lord Nigel Lawson, Chancellor in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980’s, issues a public statement that Sir Paul Nurse, the President of the Royal Society, is a global warming liar.

In his boldest attack yet on the frontman of Britain’s crumbling climate alarmist establishment Lord Lawson has thrown down a gauntlet that Nurse is not likely to pick up.  Lawson, former holder of the second highest office of government, has responded to Paul Nurse’s wild accusations that Lawson was cherrypicking data when he stated that global temperatures have been flatlining for 17 years. Lawson’s open letter published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (February, 27, 2013) where Lawson is Chairman, states:

“You [Nurse] claim that I “would choose two points and say ‘look, no warming’s taking place’, knowing that all the other points that you chose in the 20 years around it would not support his case”. That is a lie.”

Paul Nurse and Nigel Lawson

Sir Paul Nurse, who won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine, is described in the letter as more a  “shop steward for some kind of scientists’ closed shop” rather than the figurehead of Britain’s most prestigious science body.

As the man who handled Britain’s purse strings for the better part of a decade Lawson is a shrewd number cruncher. But in this case it doesn’t need a chief finance minister or a Nobel scientist to be able to read the glaringly obvious evidence from the global temperature charts. Even Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), can’t bring comfort to the ailing Nurse on this one. Only last week the IPCC’s climate change chief even acknowledged there is a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, confirmed recently by Britain’s Met Office. Will the IPCC and Met Office also be accused by the irate President of the Royal Society of “cherry picking?”

Temps flat 17 years

Meanwhile the very latest peer-reviewed science from the Global and Planetary Journal shows no relationship at all between carbon dioxide and Earth’s temperatures.

Gaffe-prone Sir Paul, who took on the presidency of the Royal Society on 1 December 2010 for a five-year term, has form in making outlandish and untrue statements about climate science. On matters global warming the evidence does appear to back Lawson’s suggestion that the Royal Society has sullied it’s once unimpeachable reputation for objectivity. An avid promoter of climate alarmism, Nurse even appeared in a BBC ‘Horizon’ documentary attacking skeptics of his political cause.

For the ‘Science Under Attack’ program Nurse teamed up with a NASA computer modeler, Dr Robert  Bindschadler, (not a climate scientist) and together they made the fraudulent claim that humans produce seven times more atmospheric carbon dioxide than nature (the truth is human CO2 emissions are only 3 per cent of all CO2 emitted). Bindschadler was later forced to retract and apologize for the “error.”

Nonetheless, Nurse justifies his zealous advocacy by declaring that scientific leaders “have a responsibility to expose the bunkum.” But then the hapless Nobel laureate contradicts himself by saying skeptic scientists are “treating scientific discussion as if it were political debate.”

No less than 43 fellows of the Royal Society have expressed their deep concerns that the institution has fallen into the trap of becoming a political mouthpiece for a privileged elite, and Nurse is not the only villain. Under its two previous presidents, Lord May and Lord Rees, the Royal Society was accused of much the same. While another leading UK science body, the Institute of Physics, has similarly been tarnished by accusations of political bias.

A key point often made by Lawson is that the role of scientists is to gather the evidence and present it to policymakers and it ill behoves the scientists to then interfere. As Lawson correctly pointed out, it is the job of policymakers to make the policy and the scientists to do the science.

Repeatedly, Sir Paul has gone on record denouncing skeptics of the man-made global warming narrative declaring his opponents were using rhetorical tricks rather than logic. “We need to emphasize why the scientific process is such a reliable generator of knowledge with its respect for evidence, for skepticism, for consistency of approach, for the constant testing of ideas,” wrote Nurse.

As Stephen Hawking said, “A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.” Man-made climate change fails on both counts. Clearly, a Nobel Prize in one science discipline is proven to be no qualification to pontificate on another.

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